Spear card suggestion

[Shurrikhan]

I agree! It would add depth to the job instead of fishing for balances all the time.

Personally, I feel like SE would have done Astrologians quite a favor to have made the card effects a bit more complex and dynamic from the start. Rather than attaching arbitrary Royal Road contributions from each, give each a set mechanic that can stack into another. For instance, let's look at a way that Bole could remain defensive but be usable on anyone, see what mechanic that would amount to, and see if it could be applied effectively into another card's effect.

At present, to make best of use of Bole it must be cast on the person who would be taking the most damage and can stand to do so, as that provides the most increased eHP and eHPS. Using it on a player who may need the 20% reduction to survive now may save you another oGCD or a rez and his consequent stat debuff, but they'd make no use of it thereafter, wasting some 90+% of its duration. Now, this could be fixed by changing it to be less reliant on duration, such as by providing a capped amount and possibly a fading percentile, or about 3 other ways, but let me lead with the craziest solution:

- Make it raid-wide effect to begin with. Bole: causes a portion of damage that would kill a player is instead split among all allies, and a portion of all allies' mitigation duplicated among each other.

Technical bits: This applies 3 buffs, Bole (which carries the duration), Roots of the Astral Tree (which carries individual percentiles), and Astral Canopy (which carries the bonus mitigation). Each time an ally takes critical or lethal damage, the portion by which it would drop him beneath critical health (20%) is reduced from the portion that is shared to the raid.

So, the purpose remains defense, but the mechanic itself becomes something of a Spirit Link.

Now, let's take a look at how Arrow might be effectively applied on anyone. Jumping straight ahead to the crazy:
- Arrow: increases the rate of time for the target by 20%. One's global recast and ability recast times cool 20% faster, all periodic effects on the target trigger 20% more quickly, and all status effects 20% more potently, at duly reduced duration. MP and TP refresh ticks occur with 20% increased strength.

Now it's still about time, and thereby output, but it's useful on HoT targets, on oGCD dependent DPS, on non-oGCD dependent DPS, healers, tanks, etc., etc. Granted, this would already include the effect of Spear.

These are probably the worst possible combination of effects to try to link, a Chronoboost and a Spirit Link. But let's see how they might meet:

Let's say you have a team where certain skills would go unused, or would be far more highly prioritized than others. To be clear, this is not an AoE Chronoboost. It is a shared Chronoboost; for an individual, it differs from a 20% increase to cooling speed in that one gets to choose what to accelerate. So, you siphon time from your allies in order to "rush" those particular casts. Horribly OP in practice? Yes. But, this is just a conceptual shot in the dark. Each player has a certain amount of time saved up from his party, and sees on each of his currently refreshing CDs two refresh indicators, one accelerated (consuming party "Acceleration") and the other normal. Hitting these normally unavailable skills once the accelerated refresh has completed would allow one to cast it then, at that cost to the party's time generated. While active, the Astrologian can also shift the remaining portions of effect (attack rate, tick rate) around to anyone in the shared group effect, or strip it from them to spread it back among everyone, using the Draw slot while it is refreshing.

So there you go, Bole RR + Arrow, for a raid group that becomes able to pick and choose what skills to rush, likely avoiding a wipe as consequence. WHM co-healer spamming Assize.

I'd offer that in this system, though, Spire and Spear ought be trimmed, as there probably aren't enough mechanics left for all if working to make each card interesting and powerful. Ewer might allow for a chain-casting and/or shared reserve/overflow mechanic, and Balance for a sort of stat gain. The Astrologian's own output can be trimmed significantly without hampering its ability to perform, as Arrow and Balance could provide high output gains, Ewer high sustain or efficiency, and Bole high damage manageability. In exchange, one would be unable to draw a card they've already put to the Royal Road, and Draw may be used while on cooldown in some cases in order to further control effects. Also, Bole, Ewer, Arrow, and Balance get visible effects while in progress, making them look like team Limit Breaks in their own right.


...

Okay, so that's a bit much, but let that just stand example that Cards easily be more interesting and potent without making the healer whose outputs have been allotted towards them unable to meet heal checks.

[Ayer2015]

Adjusting Spear, as people have mentioned, to reduce skills currently on CD would vastly improve the card. That said I personally think Balance needs to go back to 10% base.

[RulerOfPotaoes]

I actually think spear card will be a god send for SMN's who want to have Bahamut up more frequently. I might not discard it all the time if my party has 1 or more Smn's

[Sylvain]

Or they could simply make the spear shorten any already pending cooldown by 15% when applied so that this card can be useful more often than on pull if you dont have balance

I actually think spear card will be a god send for SMN's who want to have Bahamut up more frequently. I might not discard it all the time if my party has 1 or more Smn's

Problem is, u need to use it before they use their cooldown, which is the only true flaw of this card.

[RichardButte]

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

We've been suggesting this for ~2 years now and I've no idea why they've never implemented it.

My only guess is that there had to be one card that was completely undesirable to sit opposite the Balance card which is always desirable.

And before someone starts in with "But the Spear can be useful...", someone mathed out using the Spear on a ninja during their rotation (a class with a lot of short CDs) and they determined that even with 100% Spear uptime, it still resulted in a lackluster DPS increase when compared to Balance.

It's just a bad card in general because RNG dictates you don't know when you're going to draw a Spear so you can't ask your raid members to hold off on burning their CDs while you try to get one.

It would actually be pretty amazing if it reduced currently ticking CDs appropriately, but as I said, we've been asking for 2 years with no change so I'm guessing the Spear is just meant to be buns...

[NocturniaUzuki]

Alternatively, they could leave it as is because it's already a strong card. Having it affect skills currently on cooldown is a bit too overpowered as you could multi-cast it (Held + Drawn + another Draw 30 seconds later if you're lucky).

Spear is a strong card but is situational. It is also at its best when the party is not perfect. People tend to draw up all these beliefs about optimization based on a 100% flawless performance from all players. But perfection is not reality. Where the Spear card really shines is as a self-cast for emergency situations where you need to use many of your high-cooldown spells in a short period of time. This allows you to blow most or all of your emergency arsenal and have it back up quickly in case of another emergency. Essentially, it's an excellent party carry card for healers. If you're only playing in highly-experienced farming parties, then yes, it's going to appear fairly useless to you when your party has 95%+ performance consistency. But if one is more interested in playing with less consistent PUGs, then it's actually a priority card. Personally, I enjoy a certain level of unpredictability in my fights to keep things interesting. If everyone is playing near flawlessly, then fights become excessively scripted beyond just the boss' basic scripting. Therefore I spend most of my time in learning parties or in irregular content that people haven't mastered. In these situations, I am almost always holding a Spear card to use on myself whenever I need to use several cooldowns, or even just to Swift-Raise someone if people die frequently. I also occasionally use it on a tank or DPS if I notice that they are about to use important cooldown(s) with long recast times.

The bottom line is that just because a job action is not relevant to high-level play, that does not make it irrelevant in all situations. The game does not revolve around elites.

[NocturniaUzuki]

And before someone starts in with "But the Spear can be useful...", someone mathed out using the Spear on a ninja during their rotation (a class with a lot of short CDs) and they determined that even with 100% Spear uptime, it still resulted in a lackluster DPS increase when compared to Balance.

It's just a bad card in general because RNG dictates you don't know when you're going to draw a Spear so you can't ask your raid members to hold off on burning their CDs while you try to get one.

The game does not revolve around DPS optimization, contrary to the common beliefs of many high-end raiders.

P.S. In conjunction with the explanation I gave in the post above, keeping players alive or raising fallen allies will actually achieve a significantly higher DPS increase than the current Balance meta. A single DPS player being the only one dealing damage will cut your party's damage output by almost 75%. Being able to raise these fallen party members more quickly and more often (as they are likely to continue to die in many of these relevant cases) will actually amount to a larger DPS increase than simply giving constant offensive buffs to your single remaining DPS player while raising the others more slowly (not to mention it will likely avoid party wipes down the road due to lack of players available for damage-sharing mechanics, etc).

[RichardButte]

The bottom line is that just because a job action is not relevant to high-level play, that does not make it irrelevant in all situations. The game does not revolve around elites.

It has absolutely nothing to do with "elites". The Spear is a bad card to draw because there are better cards you can draw, not because hardcore raiders don't like it or something.

It's a bad card because even the best communication doesn't make it good. You can cast it on someone and hope they use some cooldowns, but as I stated above even in optimal situations, the DPS added from it is extremely marginal.

The Balance is a better card because it directly grants more damage output, the Bole because it reduces the damage a tank will take. The Spear's actual effect isn't that strong to start with, and on top of that, it has absolutely NO effect unless someone actually uses a CD while it's active.

You suggested saving it for yourself, but A) there are better cards to spread and B ). you can't anticipate when a DPS is going to take extra damage or something else that would encourage you to need to use a CDs.

By all means, if you get a Spear just as you see the need to blow a CD arise, throw it on yourself. It's better than nothing, but "better than nothing" doesn't make it actually good.

[NocturniaUzuki]

It has absolutely nothing to do with "elites". The Spear is a bad card to draw because there are better cards you can draw, not because hardcore raiders don't like it or something.

It's a bad card because even the best communication doesn't make it good. You can cast it on someone and hope they use some cooldowns, but as I stated above even in optimal situations, the DPS added from it is extremely marginal.

The Balance is a better card because it directly grants more damage output, the Bole because it reduces the damage a tank will take. The Spear's actual effect isn't that strong to start with, and on top of that, it has absolutely NO effect unless someone actually uses a CD while it's active.

You suggested saving it for yourself, but A) there are better cards to spread and B ). you can't anticipate when a DPS is going to take extra damage or something else that would encourage you to need to use a CDs.

By all means, if you get a Spear just as you see the need to blow a CD arise, throw it on yourself. It's better than nothing, but "better than nothing" doesn't make it actually good.

Don't take my analysis as nothing but some mindless attack at elites. I simply stated a fact, which is that elite players tend to see the game in terms of pure DPS optimization (assuming perfection from players). Another fact is that not everyone is an elite. In fact, elites are a minority of players. Therefore, balancing the game around only elite gameplay makes no sense. There will always be "useless" abilities at that level of play, but the answer is not to downright remove or replace those abilities. Rather, the elites simply need to ignore them and player within their sphere. Meanwhile, the players who are not striving for absolute perfection can make good use of those abilities' strengths in imperfect parties, by playing within their sphere.

You seem determined to ignore the actual point I made about Spear though, which is that it is best used on as a self-cast for party carrying as a healer. As a self-cast, the player has full control over how much use he/she will get out of the reduced cooldowns, unlike trying to predict an ally's actions. Also, holding Spear does not radically impact one's ability to use "better" cards. One can still use Royal Road and Draw freely while Spear is held. The only difference is that you can't save the card to cast at an ideal time. However, for general DPS (Balance, Arrow), the timing makes little difference as the goal is to have as much up-time on the buffs as possible, with rare exceptions, like using a Balance AoE to edge past a difficult DPS check. But then, if we're talking elite parties, the help would not be needed in passing that DPS check and the use defaults to general up-time again.

"By all means, if you get a Spear just as you see the need to blow a CD arise, throw it on yourself. It's better than nothing, but "better than nothing" doesn't make it actually good."

You act like I was suggesting to use Spear haphazardly to lower random cooldowns that I might use. That is completely misguided. Here's are some examples of how I use Spear:

Spear > Lucid Dreaming > Draw [if Ewer, use it on myself] > Celestial Opposition. This combo is ideal for hard MP sustain in rough battles, or simply battles that require hard MP usage (like A12S, for instance).

Spear > Lucid Dreaming > Swiftcast > Ascend > Draw > Lightspeed > Celestial Opposition > [if Arrow was drawn, use it on myself] > Ascend x3 or more. This combo is essentially an alternative to LB3 and has brought my party back from an expected wipe many times. As you can see, using Spear at the start reduces not just one or two cooldowns, but 5. Almost all of AST's emergency spells on reduced cooldown. In fact, prior to Stormblood, this combo would have included a Synastry on the tank. One could still throw Largesse in there somewhere, but it would be hard to get good use out of it until the end, so it may be better to wait until then and potentially skip the Spear benefit (assuming the Arrow draw). Also, if I draw Bole instead of Arrow, I throw it on the tank and use Time Dilation, which also goes on reduced cooldown.

Of course I can't predict when I'm going to have to use cooldowns. I can hazard a guess based on how experienced a party is, but usually it's all reactive. But that is, of course, why the Spear is held - so I can use it immediately in reaction to disaster situations (of which there are a lot in PUG learning parties, etc).

You might think that it's a waste to lower the cooldowns on spells that I'm "probably not going to have to use again within their usual cooldown times". All I can say to that is this: try playing with some less experienced groups. Believe me, when half the party can't stay alive for longer than a minute at a time, those reduced cooldowns make all the difference. And yes, I still believe playing in such "bad" parties is worth it. Because to me, being a healer is only fun when I actually have difficult situations to help the party recover from. Healing in experienced parties gets rather boring.

[Rubiss]

Spear is recast time, not attack speed. If I were to change it I would make it affect abilities that are currently on cooldown as well.

AST doesn't need anymore buffs.